Accidental Creatures

Ada lay on the bed, muttering on and off in a strange, moaning, singsong voice. Her skin bubbled everywhere with new growths, blurring her features into a seething mass of changing tissue. Chango sat beside Mavi, and watched as moles and tumors formed and then disappeared beneath new growth, as if her sister were boiling away from inside. There was a pattern to it, she thought. If she could only bear to watch long enough she might see it.

But in the end there was no pattern, no rhyme or reason, just a lifeless, shapeless mass of flesh, no longer identifiable as a human being or anything else. Pure matter, anonymous and silent as a lump of dirt. oOo

Be

He walked softly to the bedroom and peered inside. Hugo was in the bed, but not asleep. His eyes glittered faintly in the dim light as he looked at Be

“How you doing?” asked Be

“Alright,” croaked Hugo, his lips parting in the ghost of a smile. “How was your day?”

“Long,” said Be

“I guess they miss me down there.”

“Yeah, you bet they do. You always were the best decanter. We lost about forty cubic meters to breakage. That never would have happened when you were on the team.”

“They get you a replacement yet?”

“Nope.”

Hugo closed his eyes and shook his head. “I’ve been gone for months now. How can they expect you to keep up with production? And you said the quotas are going up.”

“Don’t worry about work, Hugo.” Be

“You have something better for me to worry about?” said Hugo.

“No, I guess not. Hey,” he stood up and pulled the memory cube from his jeans pocket. “Chango gave me this for you. Toys.”

“Cool,” Hugo took it from him with hands pitted with tiny, vestigial fingernails. Vatsickness caused random cell division, mostly tumors of mixed tissue but every once while a cell would get itself together to divide into something specific. Hugo had a tooth on the back of his left heel. Be

“How’s Chango doing, anyway?”

“She’s got a new girlfriend,” said Be

“You mean there’s actually someone left in Vattown for Chango to be new with?”

“She’s new in town. A sport but she grew up in the GeneSys building.”

Hugo tried to whistle and failed. “What’s she doing down here then?” he asked.

“Good question, my dear. Good question.”

“You think she’s spying for them?”

Be

“Maybe they know something we don’t.”

Be

“I hope not, for Chango’s sake. She should settle down already. Speaking of which, don’t you think it’s about time you found a new lover?”

“What?”

“C’mon man, you’ve been really cool to stick around this long.”

“Someone has to take care of you, Hugo. I want it to be me.”

Hugo’s gaze wandered across the ceiling. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I think it’s time I moved into Mavi’s pink room.”

“You can’t. It’s occupied right now.”

His eyes snapped back to Be

“Helix, Chango’s girlfriend. She got mugged down in Greektown.”

“You met her today?”

“Yeah.” Be

“Then she must be recovering, if she’s going out.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think she has any place to stay.”

“So what?” Hugo shrugged. “If she’s better, she can crash anywhere, and if she’s with Chango, there’ll be plenty of places for her. I’m sick. I need the room. And you — you need to get this monstrosity out of your bed.”

“Stop it!” Be

“Aw come on, you’ve got to be relieved. Let Mavi help me now. She knows what to do.”

“I told you in the begi

“No you don’t Be

“You don’t?” He turned around again. “Why? What did I do?”

Hugo shrugged and coughed. “Nothing, it’s just that... You’re too interested in it — my illness I mean. You don’t say anything, but you watch each new development with this fascinated horror. I just don’t want any spectators while I do this.”

“So you want to go to Mavi’s.”

“Yeah. I mean you can visit me and stuff, but that way you won’t be involved with the changes on a day-to-day basis. Maybe that’ll help.” Hugo started coughing again.

Be

“Yeah, sure I do.” They’d just shut down I-75, and it kept flooding. Hugo, Ada, April and he had gone swimming there all summer.

“We’d just gotten sterilized, and we were all fucking each other. Except for Ada. She always was a strict dyke. We used to call her the Vagitarian, remember?”

“Those were good times, Hugo.” Be

Chapter 8 — Inexplicable Joy

The next morning Helix and Chango went out again after breakfast, but they didn’t go to Hyper’s or Pele’s or Ha

“That’s where we used to play dodge ball,” she said, pointing to a long-disused parking lot overgrown with weeds. “Ada had a wicked throw. I used to just run like hell, but she’d always nail me, right between the shoulders.”

As they neared the vat yards, the pungent smell of growth medium intensified. Helix stopped at the fence, peering at the domed vat houses. Her fingers curled around the chain link, and she had a sudden urge to climb it.

“Come on,” said Chango up ahead. “Let’s go, it stinks around here.”

Helix looked at her, standing in the middle of the road. “Can we go in?”

“What? No! Why would we even want to?”

Helix shrugged. “To see what it looks like.”

Chango shook her head in exasperation and walked back to her. “You’re not still thinking of working there, are you?”